Saturday, 22 December 2018

Every year my
daughter was growing up, I brought her to the Wren Day at the local forest, and
was pleased to be part of a ritual that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Now that my daughter is a teenager, we
haven’t been back in a few years, but I returned last year to visit it again. I
was crestfallen, then, to find that the festival was cancelled … they couldn’t
get enough people to come, they told me, in order to pay for the insurance they
now need to pay.

I
should explain that wrens are little songbirds that remain here through the
winter, and their ritual here comes the day after Christmas. On that day we and
hundreds of our neighbours would gather in the local woods, and in a clearing with park benches and a tea shop, musicians played traditional Irish
music while locals gathered with hot drinks around fires or danced to the music, and children gathered around for the “Hunting
of the Wren.”

In
the ritual, local men dressed up as “wren boys” -- which for our group meant
looking like Robin Hood’s Merry Men – gathered around a statue of the songbird.
The wren, the men explained to all the gathered children, was sacred to the
Celts – the old Irish name for it, dreoilin, means “the Druid bird.” One day a
year, local “straw boys” – dressed like haystacks, their identities concealed
-- hunted the wren as a prize, and the Wren Boys swore to protect the bird.

As the musicians played in the background, however, and as the
children listened wide-eyed to the Wren Boys tell their stories, a group of Straw
Boys snuck up behind them, hitting sticks together menacingly, grabbed the wren and ran off. The children erupted
in delighted outrage, and the Wren Boys led hundreds of local children in a chase
through the woods until they retrieved the bird. Eventually, the two sides came
to an understanding, shook hands, and placed a small crown on the statue’s
head, declaring the wren the King of Birds.

Straw boys approaching.

A
friend of mine who specialised in folklore said the slaying of the wren meant
the slaying of winter, and the pact to accept and cherish it meant the acceptance
that winter would return – an important detail where we live, a thousand miles
from the Arctic Circle where the winter nights are long and dark. In some eras, when Irish
customs were being stamped out, the ritual had to be carried out in secret, but
they did so anyway, so devoted were they to keeping it alive. Now, our
local Wren Day is gone.

Of course, other
communities will likely still celebrate it, but I suspect fewer every year. This
is one of hundreds of ways in which the traditional, local and national cultures
have been gradually steamrolled away by the mass pop culture of Hollywood.

I realise that I’m
complaining about the loss of a tradition I didn’t grow up with myself, but the
same is true of local culture in my native USA. Songs of the Appalachians and
Ozarks, the rituals of towns and clans, are more and more preserved in amber by
aficionados or tourist boards rather than lived by children, while family
traditions grow more homogenized and dictated by the mainstream media, more
focused on buying things quickly and discarding them. The same process has
happened across Europe and, I’m told, non-Western countries where children are
raised now by screens rather than blood.

In each of those
places – in every place we have been human – mothers and fathers, aunts and
uncles, teenagers and children gathered around campfires and hearths, around
tables and altars, and shared the songs and stories that made them who they
were. They passed down skills and dishes, rituals and holidays. In more and
more places around the world now, only the older people remember such things,
while the kids play video games or watch Youtube memes, their bodies sitting
next to their grandparents but with an interior world that would be alien to
their forebears.

Of course, we’ve
done this with holidays as well, so that all the festivals people here used to
celebrate to mark the passing of the year have disappeared in the last few
generations. Mention May Day, Lughnasa,
Midsummer, Twelfth Night or to people
these days and you get blank expressions – except the last two as titles of
Shakespeare plays, among the few who know Shakespeare anymore.

Musicians at Wren Day

A few generations
ago, a neighbour tells me, local children used to gather and dance around the
May Pole in a field near us; today, I doubt any of the local children would
know what May Day was, and the same could soon be true of Wren Day. A half
century of Hollywood has done for this country what centuries of starvation and
imprisonment could not.

Nowhere is this
more true than around Christmas, which has metastasized from a holy day into a
shopping season. For only a few weeks lamp-posts and cubicles grow plastic
boughs and wreaths, and normally functional roofs sport enough lights to be
seen from space. Radio stations put aside their normal playlists to endlessly
repeat a handful of Christmas-related rock ballads over and over. Haggard faces
jam the malls and shopping districts, news announcers track the spending
numbers like a telethon host, and grim office ladies start aggressive campaigns
to cover every surface with coloured cardboard and festive glitter.If you’re like me, you want to boycott this
seasonal magic as much as possible.

Don’t
misunderstand; I cherish my own memories of Christmas, love the seasonal spirit
and can carol with gusto. For that reason, though, I ration my exposure to the
season; the decorations become a backdrop after the first time you see them,
inspiring songs quickly grow annoying, and enforced spending leeches the joy
from giving.

The radio and
television floods us with images of how our holiday is supposed to be: we are
supposed to eat too much, drink too much, spend too much and listen to the
endlessly repeated holiday songs, whether we actually enjoy these things or not,
in the name of tradition.

But most of these
customs are not the real Christmas traditions, and many were just created as
marketing gimmicks by corporations. Only in the 1930s, for example, did a
Coca-Cola advertising campaign cement our modern version of Santa Claus in the
public mind, with a red-and-white colour scheme to match their product. Some
version of Father Christmas has existed before then in other forms, of course, but
even in the early 20th century ago people depicted him in a variety of outfits,
often a green robe. He was often shown as thinner as well – perhaps it’s not a
coincidence that his obesity began when he started advertising soda pop.

Some of the
Christmas songs we treat with reverence are not particularly old either, and
some of them were also marketing campaigns: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer," for example, was invented as an advertising gimmick for
Montgomery Ward stores in 1939. Families on this side of the Atlantic tell their
children that Santa lives in Lapland, rather than the North Pole, but that seems
to have been a similarly late addition to the Christmas legend, developed
mainly by the Finnish government in the 1960s to boost tourism.

No one is saying
that all modern creations are bad, of course, and you can like whatever you
like. I’m simply saying that the actual customs that our forebears kept for
hundreds or thousands of years disappeared quickly and recently during the
Great Forgetting of modern times, replaced by less wholesome and healthy
customs manufactured by people with agendas.

In fairness, this
is the only time of year many
Americans are exposed to classic movies like It’s a Wonderful Life; repetition has turned them into white noise, and they were of
course mass media products of their own time, but they remain a window into a
less wasteful past. Likewise, if
people are going to read novelists like Dickens, recite poetry, visit family
members or sing songs in a group, it will probably be around this time of year.

But here’s the
thing: many of those things used to
happen every day. People used to spend every day with loved ones, and singing
and storytelling used to be normal, and while not everyone in every era read
books or saw plays, they used to be far more common a century or two ago than
now. Every day used to be more like the best parts of Christmas today.

Take wassailing
as an example. Today a few people here and there still sing carols around the
neighbourhood around Christmas, or even wassail -- like carolling, except that the carollers
were invited in for drinks. Only
several decades ago – in the time of motor-cars and electricity, and within the
memory of people still living – it was much more normal, even in America. Here
in Ireland, though, people
didn’t just do it at Christmas, but all through the winter, in a union of drunken
party, social gathering and prayer that has no modern equivalent.

Such customs
broke up the long darkness of winter, kept families from getting cabin fever, and
let them check on each other. It allowed each family share with their
neighbours – food drinks and stories -- in a pooling of resources. It
strengthened the feeling of community, so that burdens were lessened because they
were shared, and joys were heightened because they were shared.

The other thing
to remember is that there’s nothing stopping us from bringing back many of
these older rituals, which we might find still serve their old purpose. Wassailing
would be a great thing for many older people --- or young people, for that
matter – who don’t get out much. Give it a try, offering snacks or cider as you
go along – if one in a hundred houses lets you in, that’s one house that might
join you next year. Most importantly, you’ve planted a seed for everyone who
heard you, and made it seem more normal. It doesn’t have to stop at Christmas
either – remember that the twelve days of Christmas ends January 6 – or just
make plans for next year.

Try singing some
of the older songs; if you are tired of hearing “Fairytale of New York” or “Santa
Baby” for the thousandth time this month, try looking up the music or words for
“Angelus Ad Virginem,” “Tomorrow Will Be My Dancing Day,” or other neglected
carols from ages past. Alternately, try looking up different versions of
familiar carols; “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” came in many regional forms,
from mournful to jaunty, before settling on our current version. For my part, I’ll
talk to people about reviving Wren Day here, and see who’s interested.

Wherever you are,
your climate, neighbourhood and family will have your own customs – but look at
what your grandparents, or their grandparents, did and what could be revived.
Many of those customs, field-tested over generations, were more fun, and
healthier for body and mind, than whatever the television’s telling you to do.

Sunday, 16 December 2018

Across the world
people celebrate Christmas – or some related Western holiday that has been
caught in Christmas’ cultural orbit – with a set of familiar symbols. In
California and Calais alike stores sell cards of snowy landscapes, and paint
frosted evergreens on their windows in Florida and Florence. We all listen to
carols about snowmen and reindeer, holly and mistletoe, stocking-caps and logs
blazing on a fire. We watch White Christmas,
and feel disappointed when we don’t get one.

Yet few people question
why we embrace such relentlessly Nordic imagery. Most of us are not Saami and
have never seen a real sleigh or reindeer, nor do holly and mistletoe grow in
most of our regions.

Generations of
Hollywood films have conditioned us to expect snowbound Christmases, even
though they are no longer the norm for Missouri (Meet Me in St. Louis),
modern London (Love,
Actually), or most of the other cities where such movies are set.

I realised I did the
same thing yesterday; when I wanted to post a photo on Christmas Eve, I took
one from a few years ago, when we had an unusual snowfall. It was the photo
that looked “Christmasy” – the others would look a bit unseasonal to our eyes.

Nor, of course, do any
Nordic images have anything to do with the Middle East where Jesus lived, even
though most of us grew up putting stable-and-manger figurines in a little
snow-bound setting.

In fact, many of our
White Christmas images seem to come from one original source, the story that
has been repeated so often over the years – A Christmas Carol.
Almost every inhabitant of the First World knows the name Ebenezer Scrooge, of
course, but few of us realise how many of our holiday customs – Santa and
Christmas trees, carolling and family gatherings – were influenced, if not
necessarily invented, by that book.

When
The Girl and I read the story, however, I was impressed by how much attention Dickens paid to the weather. On almost
every page, it seems, he has a new description of chilled bones, nipped noses,
frosted fields, iced-over pools and paths trodden through snow. Characters see
their own breath indoors, and when Scrooge looks outside, he must scrub away
the layers of frost on the window – inside.

Early
on Dickens writes:

Meanwhile
the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links,
proffering their services to go before horses in carriages and conduct them on
their way. The ancient tower of a church … struck the hours and quarters in the
clouds with tremulous vibrations afterwards, as if its teeth were chattering in
its frozen head up there. The cold became intense.

In
the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the
gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of
ragged men and boys were gathered, warming their hands and winking their eyes
before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug, being left in solitude, its
overflowings silently congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice.

Dickens wasn’t making
up such scenes; he was a child when London saw the last of the Frost Fairs,
markets and gatherings held on the frozen surface of the Thames River. His
writings came at the end of the Little Ice Age, a period of two or three
centuries when the global climate dipped. During this time Dutch artists
painted images of skating on canals in April, invading armies easily crossed
from Sweden to Denmark across their oceanic straits, and famine was common
across Europe. Our Christmas images come from a time and place when the climate
was genuinely different.

Since then, in the
late 19th century to the early 21st, places like
London have seen far less snow and ice at Christmas, and Ireland less still. As
the climate grows hotter in the decades ahead, we are likely to see ever-warmer
winters and fewer White Christmases still, unless the melting Arctic ice
disrupts the Atlantic current that keeps Europe mild.

Most interesting,
though, is a possible reason why the climate dipped in the few hundred years
after 1600; Europeans colonizing the Americas. Columbus and other Spaniards
brought disease that wiped out 90 per cent of the local population, the theory
goes, which meant millions of farmers no longer farming. Billions of trees grew
up from what had once been crop fields, and each of those trees contained
tonnes of carbon that were sucked out of the atmosphere.

The rise and fall of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main factor that controls the climate;
when more carbon dioxide gets pumped into the air, as we are doing now, the
world gets hotter, and when more gets sucked out of the air, as happened in the
1500s and 1600s, the world sees colder winters that lasted into Dickens’ time.

Among other things,
this tells us what we need to do to stop the runaway climate change scientists
predict for the rest of the century. Turning more fields into trees again –
something simple and within the power of most of us – would not risk even a
little Ice Age at this point, and it could help our descendants one day see
White Christmases again.

Sunday, 2 December 2018

Thanks to everyone for continuing to check in, and sorry for the reruns; I'm taking night classes and am studying for exams. This was originally published August 2010.

Across my native USA, I whenever neighbours or townspeople lobby for more bus and rail services, pundits and politicians usually sputter something like this:

Trains and buses are a waste of taxpayers’ money. There’s no reason for them to exist. Look at the ones we have now – they’re mostly empty.

Anyone who’s ridden a bus or train recently knows that’s not even remotely true. Buses and trains are often filled to capacity, here and in America – I’m writing this from a tight squeeze in a packed double-decker. Even if those critics were right, however, they never apply that same logic to cars, for they never say:

Asphalt is a waste of taxpayers’ money, and so are highway overpasses, parking garages, car parks, traffic signals, streetlights, traffic cops and auto company bailouts. Look at the cars we have now – they’re mostly empty.

Passengers might be the most under-appreciated factor in how much fuel and money you waste. As I write this, for example, a business headline boasts of Toyota’s multi-million-dollar plan to boost fuel efficiency by 25 percent, with the usual discussion of what this will mean for the economy and the climate. Any of us, however, can boost the efficiency of our cars by several hundred percent instantly, with no additional expense or technology, simply by getting more people in the car.

This fact is also forgotten when we judge car owners by the wastefulness of their vehicles. An SUV is a spectacularly inefficient machine compared to a Prius, for example, but pack that Dodge Durango full of people and suddenly it is greener than the electric hybrid driven alone.

To use another example, your bus could be less efficient than an SUV in kilometers-per-litre, yet all of you bus passengers are making one of the greenest transportation choices around, thanks to the fact that so many seats are filled.

One of the easiest ways of cutting your expenses, fuel and carbon footprint, then, is simply to share rides with other people. Since most of us travel similar routes from clusters of houses to clusters of offices, there is no reason why carpooling should not work for most of us.

According to the website carfinance.ie, the average car in Ireland, driven 10,000 kilometers a year, will cost 1,750 euros in petrol. Divide that by four people, however, and you each save 1,300 a year. Carpooling could even pay for itself, if you propose to friends and co-workers that they pay you slightly more than the cost of fuel, as compensation for driving a little out of your way.

Some people might think they want to listen to music or a podcast on the way rather than talk to other people, and there’s no reason you can’t do even if the car is crowded. Most people, however, could do with more company. A June 2006 study in the American Sociological Review found that the number of close friends people say they have fell by a third in the previous 20 years.

Most people don’t go to poker nights or Kiwanis meetings anymore, and the number of people who know their neighbours has also fallen, but the number of hours spent commuting has more than doubled in the last few decades. Most studies show us lonelier and more stressed than people of previous generations, probably because we spend less and less of our lives being the social animals we evolved to be, and more and more staring at glowing rectangles.

Perhaps this paranoia about human company is one reason so few of us have taken up carpooling, no matter how much money they would save. A brief internet search shows that while more web sites encourage people to carpool, many people seem fearful of meeting strangers. “How could I possibly trust that the people … I’d travel with are honest guys and not awful criminals?” asked one blogger – sentiments typical of many comments on the subject, even though criminals are unlikely to use a morning carpooling route as their cover for a nefarious plan.

Contrast this with the 1930s or 40s, when regular people carpooled, hitchhiked and picked up hitchhikers, and movies and other media showed this as normal. In wartime USA and Britain carpooling, like many other self-sufficient activities, was declared a patriotic duty – propaganda posters warned against people who selfishly took up a whole car to themselves, or who let the troops down by wasting energy. Hollywood movies showed stars carpooling, Dr. Seuss drew cartoons about how many people you could pack in a car, scoutmasters gave speeches about saving fuel and money.

Nor did the posters approach carpooling as a nice way to enjoy the morning or as a hip new part of eco-fashion; rather, they could be stern in a way that few advertisements are today. “Hitler rides in the empty seat,” said one typical poster. People need this. We are counting on you.

Today many people, in many countries, are struggling again. It’s not exactly war, and not like any previous Depression. It does have a home front, though, and could benefit from some of the same solutions that were understood to be so sensible, for so long.

Saturday, 17 November 2018

Hey everyone - sorry for not posting much lately. As I've mentioned, I'm working the day job, going to night classes, and only occasionally getting a few hours here and there to get my honey from the hive, visit friends or do other chores. This will be temporary, but in the meantime keep checking in. This piece originally appeared in Low-Tech Magazine several years ago.

We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the
Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and
pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in
other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that
ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of
exposure.

Baskets, for example, have been replaced by plastic and
other kinds of factory-made containers in almost every area of life, appearing
today mainly as twee Easter decorations. Making them has become synonymous with
wasting time – “basket-weaving” in the USA is slang for an easy lesson for slow
students. The craft of basketry, however, might be one of our species’ most
important and diverse technologies, creating homes, boats, animal traps,
armour, tools, cages, hats, chariots, weirs, beehives, chicken coops and
furniture, as well as all manner of containers.

Virtually all human cultures have made baskets, and have
apparently done so since we co-existed with ground sloths and sabre-toothed
cats; for tens of thousands of years humans may have slept in basket-frame
huts, kept predators out with basket fences, and caught fish in basket traps
gathered while paddling along a river in a basket-frame boat. They might have
carried their babies in basket papooses and gone to their graves in basket
coffins.

The earliest piece of ancient basketry we have comes from
13,000 years ago, but impressions on ceramics from Central Europe indicate
woven fibres -- textiles or baskets – up to 29,000 years ago. (1) We have clues
that the technology might be far older than that; in theory, Neanderthals or
some early hominid could have woven baskets.

“The technology of basketry was central to daily
living in every aboriginal society,” wrote ecologist Neil Sugihara, and baskets
“were the single most essential possession in every family.” (2) Early humans
must have regularly cropped basketry plants as they would edible plants, and
burned woodlands to encourage their growth, according to anthropologist M. K.
Anderson. Anderson even proposes that some of the first agriculture might have
been to grow basketry crops, not food crops. (3)

….

Eel trap, courtesy of Wikicommons

Baskets come in several main types. Coiled baskets appeared early, created by
winding flexible plant fibres from a centre outward in a spiral and then sewing
the structure together. Their spiral nature, however, limits them to circular
objects like bowls or hats. Beehive containers, called skeps, were built this
way for hundreds of years, and straw hats still are today.

The earliest American baskets were twined; fibre was wound
around a row of rigid elements like sticks – wrapped around a stick, twisted,
wrapped around the next one and twisted again. The sticks would seem to limit
this approach to flat surfaces like mats, but bending and shaping the sticks
allows twining to create a variety of containers and shapes.

Still others were plaited, with flexible materials
criss-crossed like threads through cloth. The Irish flattened and plaited
bulrushes for hundreds of years into mats and curtains. Here too, the approach
would seem to limit plaiting to flat surfaces, but as the rushes must be woven
while green and flexible and harden as they dry, they can be plaited around a
mould to create boxes, bags or many other shapes.

Wicker, however, probably remains the most versatile
technique, weaving flexible but sturdy material like tree shoots around upright
sticks that provide support. Wicker is the form used for fences, walls,
furniture, animal traps and many other advanced shapes, and when you picture a
basket, you’re probably picturing wicker too. (4)

….

Once early humans mastered the technique of fashioning
wicker, they began using it for a variety of purposes beyond carrying and
preparing food, and shelter probably came next. Wattle fences were made with a
row of upright poles with flexible wood cuttings woven between them, a basket
wall. Unusually, they could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or
two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a
new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.

The uprights, sometimes called zales or sails in Britain,
were typically rounded at the end and placed in a wooden frame, sometimes
called a gallows, to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow
or hazel – were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the
hurdle the withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the
last zale, and woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left
in the middle of the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or
farmer to carry a few hurdles as a time on his back.

According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital
to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for
permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch
of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers
necessary for cereal crops. (5)

The same technique could form the walls of a house, once a
log or timber frame was built and the wattle filled in with a “daub” plaster
for insulation and privacy. The daub often contained clay, human or animal hair
and cow dung, and hardened around the wattle like concrete around rebar. The
resulting structure could last for centuries, and even now restoring or
demolishing old buildings sometimes reveals wattle inside the walls.

Similar techniques were used by cultures around the world,
from Vikings to Chinese to Mayans. While their cheap and easily available
materials made them an obviously popular and practical building method, not all
builders loved it as a building material. The Roman architect Vetruvius, in the
first century AD, moaned about the hazards of such cheap material in his Ten
Books on Architecture:

“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never
been invented,” Veruvius wrote. “The more it saves in time and gains in space,
the greater and the more general is the disaster that it may cause; for it is
made to catch fire, like torches. It seems better, therefore, to spend on walls
of burnt brick, and be at expense, than to save with ‘wattle and daub,’ and be
in danger. And, in the stucco covering, too, it makes cracks from the inside by
the arrangement of its studs and girts. For these swell with moisture as they
are daubed, and then contract as they dry, and, by their shrinking, cause the
solid stucco to split.

But since some are obliged to use it either to save time or
money, or for partitions on an unsupported span, the proper method of
construction is as follows. Give it a high foundation so that it may nowhere
come in contact with the broken stone-work composing the floor; for if it is
sunk in this, it rots in course of time, then settles and sags forward, and so
breaks through the surface of the stucco covering.” (6)

Coracles in Wales, courtesy of Wikicommons.

Improbable as it sounds, basketry has long been used to make
boats. How long we don’t know, but humans appeared in Australia 40,000 years
ago, even though it was separated from Asia even in the Ice Age. They might
have built wicker boats covered in animal skins, but even if they merely tied
logs together into rafts, they must have had the related technology of making
fibre and tying it into knots.

The Irish used woven boats, or coracles, for hundreds – and
probably thousands -- of years; they are mentioned in medieval Irish literature
and are still made by aficionados today. All were woven from willow or hazel
and covered with a hide – usually cow hide, but horse-hide and sealskin were
also used – and supposedly waterproofed with butter. All of them were
alarmingly tiny crafts in which a person sat cross-legged and sat carefully
upright to avoid tipping over, like a bowl-shaped kayak. The coracle’s small
size and lightweight construction ensured that, after the occupant had paddled
across rivers, lakes or marshes, he could pick up his boat and walk across
country with ease.

To take to the sea, the Irish wove curraghs -- larger and
oval-shaped to navigate across choppy waters, but still no larger than a
rowboat. Documentary footage from 1937 showed men constructing a Boyne curragh;
first planting hazel rods in the ground in the desired shape, and weaving a
tight frame between them along the ground – what would become the gunwale, or
rim, when the frame was flipped over. Then the hazel rods were twisted together
to make a wicker dome, and the frame was uprooted and turned upright and a hide
placed around the frame and oiled. (7)

One common use of such craft was to set and gather fish and
eel traps from rivers and lobster pots from the sea – also made, of course,
from wicker. Such foods were an important source of protein, especially in
Catholic countries where meat was sometimes forbidden. The traps operated on a
simple principle; a bit of bait could lure an animal into the trap but, if it
were shaped properly, they would be unable to escape.

….

Baskets can be woven with any one of hundreds of plant
species, depending on whatever was available. In more tropical climates people
used cane or raffia, while other peoples used straw or some other grass or
reed. In temperate areas like Europe a wide variety of branches and plants were
available: dogwood, privet, larch, blackthorn and chestnut branches; broom,
jasmine and periwinkle twigs; elm, and linden shoots; ivy, clematis,
honeysuckle and rose vines; rushes and other reeds, and straw.

Perhaps the most popular, however, was willow -- sallies or
silver-sticks here in Ireland, osiers in Britain, vikker in Old Norse, the last
of which became our word “wicker.” highly pliable when young or wet,
lightweight and tough when dried, and growing so quickly that a new crop of
branches up to two to three metres long can be harvested each year.

They are one of the earliest trees to grow back appear after
an old tree falls and leaves a gap of sunlight in the forest, or after a forest
fire razes an area, they are perhaps the tree closest to a weed in behaviour.
Their roots spread rapidly under the surface of the soil, making them an ideal
crop to halt erosion. Their fast growth makes an excellent windbreak, the basis
of most hedgerows, and makes them particularly useful in our era for
sequestering carbon and combating climate change. The bark of the white willow
(Salix alba) can be boiled to form acetecylic acid, or aspirin.

In addition, the common variety Salix viminalis or “basket
willow,” has been shown to be a hyper-accumulator of heavy metals. Many plants
help “clean” the soil by soaking up disproportionate levels of normally toxic
materials, either as a quirk of their metabolism or as a way of protecting
themselves against predators by making themselves poisonous. Many plants soak
up only a single toxin, others only a few; Viminalis, it turned out, soaked up a
broad range, including lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, zinc, fossil-fuel
hydrocarbons, uranium, selenium, potassium ferro-cyanide and silver. (8) (9)
(10)

Many hardwood trees can be coppiced, cut through at the
base, or pollarded, cut at head-height , and regrow shoots on a
five-to-twenty-year time scale. Willows, however, do not need to grow to
maturity, and continue to thicken at the base and grow a fresh crop of shoots
each year. Basket-weavers here harvested willow as a winter ritual – ten tonnes
to the acre – from fields of large century-old stumps that had never been
mature trees. (11)

Once the willow is cut it could be dried with the bark on,
or the bark could be stripped off. Stripping was a tedious task but it made the
willow easier to quickly prepare and use, reduced the risk of decay, and it
gave the willow a valued white colour. To strip the bark a large willow branch
was cut partway down its length, with metal strips attached to the inside of
the cut; the weaver could hold the branch between their legs and use it as we
would use a wire-stripping tool to remove insulation. When cuttings were too
thick to manipulate, a special tool called a cleve was used to cut them three
ways down their length.

Withies were typically dried for several months and kept
indefinitely before soaking again for use. Willow can be woven straight from
the tree, but as it dries it loosens and the weave shifts and rattles, which is
seldom desirable. To a novice, preparing the materials presents as much of a
challenge as the actual weaving, as the willow must be dried but re-soaked,
kept wet without rotting, and used before becoming dry and brittle again.

Today a small but growing movement of people around the
world tries to rediscover and re-cultivate traditional crafts and technologies.
Many such techniques deserve to be revived; but some require substantial
experimentation, skill, training, infrastructure or community participation.
Not all low-tech solutions can be adopted casually by modern urbanites taking
their first steps toward a more traditional life.

Basket-weaving, however, requires no money other than that
needed for training and possibly materials. It uses materials easily found in
almost every biome on Earth, requires few if any tools. Highly skilled weavers
can create works of art, but simple and practical weaves can be done by almost
anyone. Out of hundreds of traditional crafts, none has so many everyday
applications.

C. D. Mell’s 1908 book Basket Willow Culture urged
farmers to grow willows as a cash crop to feed the continual demand of weaving
material, maintaining that “the demand for basket willow rods is very great and
every year many thousands of bundles of rods … are imported from France,
Germany and Holland.” Incredibly, it seemed that as highly valued as baskets
were in the USA, the then-sparsely-inhabited country was still importing willow
from comparatively small and crowded Old World countries. (12)

Friday, 2 November 2018

On these last brilliant autumn days, the hedgerows are giving
up the last of their fruits to the birds and local foragers. Red haws cluster
so thickly on the branches now that that they droop over the fields, on branches
so thin that they wobble even when tiny birds like hawfinches and thrushes land
to fatten up for winter.

When they pick one, other more overripe haws dropped
from the branches to the grass below, which rustled in response – mice or
voles, I supposed, waiting for treats like dogs under the table.

Sloes still cling tightly to their thorny branches, and the final
rose-hips dot the vines that wind their way up the trunks. Ours are tiny, wild
rose-hips, evolved to suit birds and not human foragers, but on my way to work
I pass a community garden with rose-hips the size of figs. I’d love to find out
what variety it is and plant some around us for making jam next autumn – roses are
pretty and all, but my tastes run to the practical.

I wondered why a garden in the grimy brewery district of
Dublin was doing so well, and then I realised – it’s around the corner from
where rows of horse-drawn carriages line up to take tourists around Dublin. Some
afternoons I see locals eagerly scooping up the manure and bringing it back to
their plot, sometimes in two giant bags hanging from their bicycle handles.

Recently I visited my neighbour down the road, an old man
who has lived in the area all his life, and who shows me the local castles and
graveyards here and talks about the history of all the local families. On the
day of our first frost, I knocked on his door to return a book, and I asked him
what kind of winter he expected.

“A harsh one, I think,” he said. “We’ve had a hot summer,
and we often get a harsh winter after that – as we did last year, with a metre
of snow. You can’t really say anymore these days,” he added, noting that the
weather was less predictable than it used to be.

We talked a bit about the hedgerows, and I noted how many
Americans didn’t have them – we all divided our properties with chain-link fences
that rusted, didn’t cut the wind, and didn’t offer privacy or food.

“People are tearing them down here too,” my neighbour said.
“It’s a shame – when we plant fields, we need the border to make the field work.”
He explained how their fruit brings birds that fertilise the fields, they keep
soil from escaping the field after a rain, and their hardy trees and wild
plants soak up whatever farmers spray on the crops.

Hedges along the hills in summer

That’s interesting, I said – that the wild borders were
necessary for the field to thrive. The Old Testament repeats over and over that
people are not to cut the edges of their land, and were always to leave some of
the crops left over – in Leviticus 19:9, for example. It was supposed to be for
gleaners and people who were poor, but I wonder if part of the reason,
consciously or unconsciously, was to also give some of it back to Nature. How
do most farmers here feel about these things?

“It depends on the farmer,” he said. “I was talking to a
neighbour here who decided to go organic. He had spread pesticides over the
fields every year, but he would come out and see it covered in dead worms
afterwards. He decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.”

I’ll be interested to hear how he gets on, I said. Although
pesticides aren’t exactly new here -- are the dead worms a new phenomenon? I
wonder if his pesticide changed. I had read a study last year that found that
tillage agriculture was harming worm populations, but I’m not sure if changing
to organic would help that.

I also find it interesting that no birds had snapped up the
dead worms – I was hearing someone the other day say that they remember as a
child seeing flocks of birds follow their tractor around after ploughing, but
now they don’t.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’ve noticed that birds used
to follow the cows around less than they used to.”

“What everyone used to do whenever they could was to let
ground rest for a while after growing things on it, or let cows graze on it,”
he told me. “That did the same thing the hedgerows do. The local landowner here,
around a hundred years ago, used to grow the best potatoes of anyone, as he
would grow them only on land that had been fallow the previous year. Of course,
that was because he had the extra land to do that.”

I often see that today, I said – upper-class people will do
well, and think it was all their own hard work. They might indeed have worked
hard, but people don’t see their own advantages.

Our hedge in winter

It made sense to me that that letting land “rest” would help
rejuvenate it; in the wild, a plot of barren land will quickly be covered by a
profusion of different species, which cover the ground, protect it from erosion
by rain, bloom with many different flowers, bring many different pollinators,
which feed different birds. They each bear different fruit or seeds, and many bring
in their own fungus or bacteria colonies with their roots. As the plants and
small critters spread across the surface of the soil, much more is growing
under it – from mushroom colonies to worms to tens of thousands of species of
tiny beasts, from miniature to microscopic – and once living things have done
their job, they turn them into soil again. In other words, the living system
takes the depleted funds of the soil and rebuilds a rich credit account of
nutrients, before we make a withdrawal and turn it into another round of crops
for ourselves.

I suppose most people just had a small plot, and only grew
potatoes? I asked.

“They had to,” he said. “Each person had so little land for
themselves, and nothing else would feed them all the time but potatoes. But it
meant you had to grow the same crops on the same land, over and over, and never
gave the land a rest. Nothing but the same plants tires out the land, taking
the same minerals from it year after year, and tires ground makes the plants
sickly. I know the blight was the main reason for the Famine, but I can’t help
but think that tiring out the land didn’t help.”

Tree along the canal near our house

That’s an interesting point, I said. I told him about the essay by Ugo Bardi some years ago, determining that soil erosion made the Famine
worse: After Britain conquered Ireland, its trees went to make up London’s
buildings and Britain’s fleet, and soil erosion took its toll on the deforested
land. I also told him that in America, there are vast areas where people only
grow corn, or wheat, year after year.

“I think we had the Famine because we pushed our land to its
limit,” my neighbour said. “And I think we’re doing it again.”

Saturday, 6 October 2018

In perhaps one of the great ironies of human civilisation, mechanical
devices to truly magnify human power came along as soon as we didn’t need
them. Pedal-powered devices like bicycles only appeared after coal
had already begun to transform the landscape, however – mass production was
necessary for the standardised metal parts -- and around the same time that
gasoline was first being introduced as a fuel for automobiles.

We tend to forget, then, three important things about the bicycle.
First, it remains the most efficient method of using our bodies, allowing us to
attain higher machine speeds for longer than we would on muscle power alone –
and without using any more fuel or causing any more weather to go haywire.

Bicycles have been used for so long as children’s toys and exercise
equipment that we forget what useful technology they represent. They multiply
our bodies’ speed and efficiency many times over, allowing us to travel miles
without strain. Their widespread adoption in the late 19th century created a
ripple of under-appreciated effects in society; for example, they allowed women
to commute to jobs away from home and paved the way for the universal sufferage
movement.

Second, bicycles have seen many improvements in the last hundred years,
most of which have escaped the notice of anyone but enthusiasts. Many of the
bicycles we use today function mainly as toys, and racing bikes are built for
speed; sturdier bicycles – often going under the name of “military bicycles”
can still be ordered.

Most importantly, though, bicycles are only one of many possible
pedal-powered machines that were not used for transportation. Beginning in the
19th century, factories began to make and stores to market treadles for
manufacturing everything from cigars to brooms to hats. Farms saw foot-powered
harvesters, tractors, threshers, milking machines and vegetable bundlers.
Machinists saw pedal-powered drills.

“…no matter how simple it seems to us today, pedal power could not have
appeared earlier in history,” wrote Kris DeDecker in LowTech Magazine. “Pedals
and cranks are products of the industrial revolution, made possible by the
combination of cheap steel (itself a product of fossil fuels) and mass
production techniques, resulting in strong yet compact sprockets, chains, ball
bearings and other metal parts.”

Today, we have built a world that runs on fossil fuels, which will not last forever. Eventually we will not be able to depend on
familiar machines like cars and electronics - - either because we won’t be able
to afford them, or to afford continually fixing them, or because fuel prices
will be out of reach.

One way or another, we will have to go back to muscle power, and the
best way to do that is to revive the lost technologies of pedal-powered tools.
Most of these devices exist today only as a few rare museum specimens, but we
should easily be able to build more. The irony, though, is that we need to
build them while we still have fossil fuels.

“It is important to realise that pedal powered machines (and
bicycles) require fossil fuels,” DeDecker writes “If we burn up all fossil
fuels driving cars, we won't be able to revert to bicycles, we will have to
walk. If we burn up all fossil fuels making electricity to drive our
appliances, we won't be able to revert to pedal powered machines, but to the
drudgery that went before them.”

Perhaps more people around here will take to bicycles again, as I will
now that I have a headlamp to light my way during the winter nights. Older people here
remember when the bicycle was the most popular method for getting from one
village to another, and the roads were safer then with so few cars. It’s
possible that the schoolchildren of today will see those days again.

Sunday, 30 September 2018

Sorry for the light posting. I've been taking night classes in Dublin, so on school nights I've been getting up around 6 am, bicycling a few miles to the bus stop, leaving my bike in my neighbour's barn, and taking it to my day job. I work my day job, go to night classes, and ride back around 11 pm. Even on nights when I don't have classes, I've been riding home around 9 pm. It hasn't left a lot of time for writing outside of my weekly column.

I would have done this earlier in life, but was spending all my spare time with my daughter. These days, my now-teenager mainly wants to spend time with her friends. Occasionally she's willing to go to a movie or concert with me -- we went to see Charlie Chaplin's City Lights a few months ago, and is willing to see Verdi's Aida on stage with me in November -- and I'm satisfied with that. Most teenaged girls wouldn't want to go with their father to such things at all these days, so I count my blessings. Most of the time I reluctantly play the villain of her story, the Strictest Parent among all her friends.

With all this going on, it was relaxing to sleep late today, fetch some vegetables right from the garden, sautee them with blood pudding and coffee on a chilly Irish morning, and tend to the garden. Tomorrow I'll be extracting the honey from my hive for the year, which should last us through next year and make some Chrsitmas gifts for the neighbours.

Speaking of the neighbours, I've been spending almost every weekend visiting with one of my local elders, and sometimes travelling with them while they show me around. I walked with one elderly friend around the ruins of Carbury Castle last weekend, and I'll have much more to write about that. For now, here is a snippet of our interview -- I've left his name out and changed the local names for privacy.

Me: I remember when a friend of mine visited from America, and
she was interested in the River Boyne knew that the head was around here. We
found it on the map and looked for it on the ground, came onto the old estate
there in Carbury, and met the old landowner …

Neighbour: Mr. Robison.

Me: That’s right – and he pointed out where the head of the
Boyne was, and that’s where the whole river starts. I’d never seen the head of
a river before – it’s just a pool. You associate the Boyne and its history with
the North, but that’s where it starts.

Neighbour: There’s also a holy well there; we hold
an open-air Mass once a year, on Trinity Sunday. The family that built that estate moved out of Carbury Castle in the 1600s, the time of Cromwell, but they wanted to live where they could still see the Castle in the distance, and you can.

The other thing I wanted to say to you is that the local
burial ground is up there too, for hundreds of years but not always in the same place … When they
were building the canal – according to the local history, this is what we were
told -- with the route the canal was taking, there was a graveyard in the way,
so they moved it all to one side.

Me: The caskets?

Neighbour: Ah, this was a long time ago, I’d say there
were only bones. I was told they moved it with horse and cart, and there were
only clay and bones. When you see the local burial ground it’s much higher on
one end, because a lot more bones were put there. That was the local burial
ground for people of this area, their forebears going back several hundred years or more. They were the old names of this
locality -- they intermarried, and it was their hands that ploughed these
fields and cut this turf going back several hundred years or more.

Me: So each of the old families here owned plots of land
along the canal when it was built? How big were the plots?

Neighbour: Anything between seven and ten acres.

Me: Was that enough to live on?

Neighbour: It had to be. And when the estates were broken
up, they were given an additional 15 an 20 acres to go with that from the Land
Commission.

Me: Because their families were always expanding?

Neighbour: Yes, and the English landlord of this area left each family seven to ten acres to live on, and in each generation some of
the children just had to leave. That was supposed to feed them with the help of
whatever money they made working for the landlord.

Me: But the landowners would own huge chunks of a county,
wouldn’t they?

Neighbour: The local landlord here owned perhaps 20,000 acres. Often the local farmers paid rent to the landlord
– that’s why there were evictions during the Famine.

That wasn’t the case in
this area – most farmers' ancestors had helped build the canal, and were rewarded with ownership of their little plots. They might have starved, but none were evicted.

Sunday, 16 September 2018

This article appeared this week in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper. Illustration by Ken Avidor.

We remember civilisations by what they leave behind, from
arrowheads to pyramids, then our age will be known as the Age of Rubbish.
Nothing else dominates our landscape, our oceans, our air and soil, and our
lives like the things we buy, use quickly, and casually toss away.

Humans have been leaving things behind since we came down
from the trees and stood upright, but garbage is a new invention, most of it
dating from after the Second World War – and decades later here in Ireland.
Most humans, in most times and places, had no garbage in the sense that we do;
there were no tips, no roadside littering, no need for Tidy Town volunteer
clean-up crews. Everything around us came from the natural world, was part of
it, and went back to it as soon as it was discarded.

You might point to the broken pottery and arrowheads dug up by
enthusiastic archaeologists, but those exceptions prove the point: they are
precious because they are so rare and unusual. For 99.9 per cent of the time
humans have been around, what few belongings we had were used over and over,
and repaired until they broke.

Your grand-father’s cart, or saddle, or shovel, or
newspaper, or any other possession, were made of organic and natural materials.
They could be repaired and re-used over and over, and at the end of its life it
could be made into firewood or composted into soil again, metal parts re-forged
into something new.

I’m using horse-carts as an example, but you could say this
about almost any item possessed by your grandparents, or any of their
ancestors. A steel shovel would be hammered back into shape, its wooden handle
replaced. A newspaper could be re-purposed in several ways around the house
before being composted. Virtually every item that humans used could be re-used,
repaired, re-forged, re-set, or simply turned into ashes or soil again.

Even when our civilisation industrialised – even during the
eras of movies and cars, airplanes and Einstein – almost all our waste was
organic and compostable. Writer Chris Agee mentions that in the industrial
mega-polis of early 1900s London, about 85% of waste was cinders and charcoal,
easily returned to the soil cycle, and much of the rest was bio-degradable,
like wood, paper and compost.

Of course, some of these things could be buried where there
is no oxygen, as many newspapers were in the early 20th century, and
they will take a long time to decompose. Left out in the open, though, a
newspaper quickly turns into damp mush, its bits pulled down below earth by
worms. A newspaper discarded on someone’s lawn in the 1960s will certainly not
still be sitting there today in its original form. A piece of plastic, however,
will be.

In the last few decades, the world of durable tools and
elegant machines has slowly disappeared, replaced by one in which our food,
clothes, tools, toys and electronic devices are all made of plastic or come
wrapped in plastic-- made to be bought, used quickly, discarded and then sit as
harmful junk for tens of thousands of years. Plastic does not appear in Nature,
so no insect, fungus or bacteria has evolved to eat it. When I compost our
kitchen scraps, the orange peels and egg cartons all break down over a year or
so into rich black soil. The few bits of plastic wrapper that fall in, though,
remain plastic wrappers, and will remain so for millennia.

Some of this rubbish goes into landfills that have now
become the most gigantic structures every built by humankind – the one outside
New York, for example, is hundreds of times larger than the pyramids of Egypt.
Some gets washed to the sea and floats there, forming patches of ocean the size
of small continents where one is rarely out of sight of some kind of floating
garbage.

In his amazing book “The World Without Us,” Alan Weisman
tells the story of University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson,
who began studying plastics in the ocean in the 1980s helping to clean up the
beaches near his home. As he compiled the team’sannual reports, he noticed more and more
garbage that was smaller and smaller, and he and his colleague began collecting
samples, sieving beach sand and realising that more and more of the sand was
plastic.

In fact, many of the tiny plastic bits – called nurdles –
had never been part of any larger food wrapper, laptop or Barbie doll. Some
were simply raw materials from which larger plastic is made, flushed out of
some factory before being used, while others are exfoliants from beauty
products. Many facial scrubs, body scrubs and hand cleaners on the market today
have a grainy texture because they are filled with tiny bits of plastic, and as
soon as they are washed down the sink they go to the nearest river, to the
nearest ocean, to fill up the water with bits of plastic and choke or poison
multitudes of sea creatures.

Plastics are a new substance on Earth; before World War II,
virtually none had been invented, and the oceans and rivers were plastic-free.
Of course humans had created other kinds of pollution; we filled some cities
with coal smog and some rivers with chemicals, and had already started pumping
the carbon dioxide that would build up in the atmosphere until the weather
itself began to change.

All those things, however, are temporary and easily fixable.
Take smog; Seventy years ago London was notorious for its smog, factory coal
smoke plus Britain’s usual fog to create a noxious air that killed many people.
Over the next few decades, however, environmental laws forced factories to
clean up their emissions somewhat, while plane trees planted along London’s
streets helped pull toxins out of the air. Most of all, some factories moved
out of the city, and while that is not all good news – some of them just moved
to the Third World – it also reduced London’s noxious air, until “smog” went
from being a daily fear to a historical curiosity.

The same is true of most environmental threats. Even the
wild storms and temperature swings of climate change could be reduced
dramatically for future generations – quickly and easily, by us today. All we
would have to do would be to plant a lot more trees – say, across the American Central
Asian prairies, stopping the spread of deserts and pulling more carbon out of
the atmosphere.

Humans have done this before, albeit inadvertently; when
Europeans reached the Americas, they unknowingly brought ten thousand years’
worth of diseases that wiped out most of the native populations. Much of North
and South America had been fields and farms, or woodland periodically cleared
for game; when the native populations died off, millions of acres grew back
billions of trees, each sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide
traps the sun’s heat, so the effect was the opposite of today’s climate change;
by lowering the carbon dioxide levels, they lowered the global temperature, and
the result was the “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s and 1700s, when Londoners
could hold public fairs on the then-thick ice of the Thames.

Most of our environmental threats, then, could be fixed if
we had the will to fix them, and we can estimate how long they would take to
heal. Plastics, however, are another matter. While we have built a throwaway
society around them, and have flooded the oceans and landscape with them, we
know little about how long they would take to decompose, or what toxic
chemicals they will unleash as they do so. No plastic has ever died a natural
death yet.

When Thompson looked at sieved ocean samples fromWorld War II to the present, he saw almost no
plastic until the 1950s. In the 1960s, though, any casual sieving of ocean
water began to bring up bits of plastic, and then that amount of plastic grew
exponentially in the decades that followed. Moreover, he said, since they were
only straining the surface, they were probably severely underestimating the
amount of plastic in the sea.

Our use and discarding of plastic has several effects on the
sea. First, it destroys sea life – endangered sea turtles that have survived
since the days of the dinosaurs are now choking on grocery bags, and sea otters
get tangled in the plastic ring-holders for beer cans. It’s not just a case of
animals being stupid; floating shopping bags, often coated in algae, can look
identical to the jellyfish that turtles naturally eat.

The other rubbish we generate can bio-degrade eventually, if
they are exposed to the elements; leather and newspaper, wood and metal, all
rot or rust and return to the natural world from whence they came. Plastic,
though, will always be with us, on any meaningful time frame.

Getting rid of the plastic in our lives sounds unthinkable
-- a testament to how much of our lives has been taken over by this material –
but it helps to remember that almost everything we do today we did fifty years
ago, just without plastics. The problem is that so few products are made
without plastics anymore – I admit that I’m writing this on a laptop that’s
partly plastic, because there aren’t any laptops encased in wood or leather.

Of course we can cut back on our plastic use in a thousand
small ways in our lives; re-using the same coffee mugs and shopping bags,
asking the butcher to put our meat in a sealable container rather than a
throwaway bag, buying individual cans of beer – or just brewing your own –
rather than getting the six-pack. We can get wooden toys for our children
rather than plastic toys, and use twine ropes to secure things on our car
instead of vinyl ropes, and leave fish alone altogether, as the fishing
industry is one of the most destructive sources of ocean plastic. Most of all,
we can weigh our rubbish every week to see how much we use – if you forgo
plastic and compost your food, you should reduce your rubbish to almost
nothing.

This saves you a lot of money, in addition to the amount you
save by not buying things and throwing them away. You might not care about sea
turtles and otters, but you might realise that using plastics is costing you a
great deal in the long run, and that abandoning them lightens your life.

Ultimately, though, personal and individual choices will not
put more than a dent in our plastic use; the real action has to come from
governments restricting what companies can manufacture and throw away. And
before we can persuade governments, we need to persuade people.

Check out
documentaries like “A Plastic Tide” or “Trashed,” read books like “The World
Without Us” or “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story,” and look at web sites from
zero-waste groups. Give speeches about them to your local school students,
Rotary Clubs, Toastmasters or 4-H Clubs, and to local church groups. Contact
organisations and set up a network of people in your area who are interested in
the same issues.

Get everyone in your area to understand that they can use
very little plastic in their own lives and still live a normal life, and that
our civilisation could function on zero plastics and still go on. It has
before, in the memory of people still living.